The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has completed the move from its own Git service to the proprietary Github code-hosting platform. As a kind of umbrella organization, the ASF manages a large number of different individual projects, which are only partially related to one another. The organization itself is described as the largest of its kind in the open source community worldwide.
The ASF currently manages around 350 projects, which are now to be developed officially on Github. This is done by currently around 7,000 contributors with commit rights to the code and countless other developers. Taken together, the various ASF projects currently comprise more than 200 million lines of code. Some well-known projects of the ASF such as OpenOffice but are developed only relatively sporadically and have a little worth mentioning developer community.
The move to Github is the temporary end to a longer process. Thus, the projects of the ASF years ago could decide between the use of its own version control Subversion or Git. Over the years, many projects migrated to Git and ultimately wanted to provide their code on Github itself.
Initially, the organization made this possible only with official read-only mirror servers. However, the developers’ pressure to be able to actively use Github was too high so that the platform can now be officially used by all Apache projects. The move took only a few months and has been completed since February 2019. Github itself wants to continue to support the developers and projects in case of problems that may still exist.